Young Lives eBook

Now, in thus appealing to Dot, her father had appealed
to just the one out of all his children who was least
likely to disappoint him. To Dot and Henry had
unmistakably been transmitted the largest share of
their father’s spirituality. Esther was
not actively religious, any more than she was actively
poetic. Hers was one of those composite, admirably
balanced natures which include most qualities and faculties,
but no one in excess of another. Such make those
engaging good women of the world, who are able to
understand and sympathise with the most diverse interests
and temperaments; as it is the characteristic of a
good critic to understand all those various products
of art, which it would be impossible for him to create.
Thus Esther could have delighted a saint with her
sympathetic comprehension, as she could have healed
the wounds of a sinner by her comprehensive sympathy;
but it was certain she would never be, in sufficient
excess, spiritually wrought or sensually rebellious
to be one or the other. She was beautifully, buoyantly
normal, with a happy, expansive, enjoying nature, glad
in the sunlight, brave in the shadow, optimistically
looking forward to blithe years of life and love with
Mike and her friends, and not feeling the necessity
of being anxious about her soul, or any other world
but this. She was not shallow; but she merely
realised life more through her intelligence than through
her feelings. To have become a Baptist would have
offended her intelligence, without bringing any satisfaction
to spiritual instincts not, in any event, clamorous.

As for Henry, it was not only activity of intelligence,
but activity of spirituality, that made it impossible
for him to embrace any such narrow creed as that proposed
to him; and, for the present, that spiritual activity
found ample scope for itself in poetry.

Dot’s, however, was an intermediate case.
With an intelligence active too, she united a spirituality
torturingly intense, but for which she had no such
natural creative outlet as Henry. With her loss
of the old creed,—­in discarding which these
three sisters had followed the lead of their brother
with a curious instinctiveness, almost, it would seem,
independent of reasoning,—­her spirituality
had been left somewhat bleakly houseless, and she
had often longed for some compromise by which she
could reconcile her intelligence to the acceptance
of some established home of faith, whose kindly enclosing
walls should be more genially habitable to the soul
than the cold, star-lit spaces which Henry declared
to be sufficient temple.

Perhaps Esther’s commiseration of her sisters’
narrow opportunities was, so far as it related to
Dot, a little unnecessary, for indeed Dot’s
ambitions were not social. By nature shy and meditative,
and with her religious bias, had she been born into
a Catholic family, she might not improbably have found
the world well lost in a sisterhood. The Puritan
conscience had an uncomfortable preponderance in the
deep places of her nature, and, far down in her soul,
like her father, she would ask herself if pleasure
could be the end of life—­was there not something
serious each of us could and ought to do, to justify
his place in the world? Were we not all under
some mysterious solemn obligation to do something,
however little, in return for life?